The 2024 biopic A Complete Unknown revisits Bob Dylan’s rise to fame and details one of his most important relationships.
In the film, which stars Timothée Chalamet as Dylan, the “Like a Rolling Stone” musician’s live-in girlfriend is named Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning). But in real life, his famous New York muse was the late artist Susan “Suze” Rotolo.
The pair dated from 1961 to 1964 and were famously photographed for the cover of his 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Dylan and Rotolo’s time together inspired many of the singer’s early hits like “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “One Too Many Mornings” and “Tomorrow Is a Long Time.”
Writer-director James Mangold told Deadline in December 2024 that Dylan requested they not use Rotolo’s real name in A Complete Unknown, which came out on Dec. 25.
“Bob talked to Jim a lot about the script, and the one thing he wanted was Suze’s name to be changed in the script because he felt like she wasn’t a public figure,” Fanning told Gold Derby. “She always wanted to remain a private person. I really held that in my heart, the gravity of Bob’s choice, because they had stayed close until she passed away in 2011.”
So, who is Sylvie Russo based on in A Complete Unknown? Here’s everything to know about Bob Dylan’s real-life ex-girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, and her relationship with the singer.
She was born in New York City
Susan Elizabeth Rotolo was born on Nov. 20, 1943, in New York City. Both of her parents were members of the Communist Party: Her mother was an editor for an Italian-language Communist newspaper, and her father was an artist and a union organizer, per The New York Times. Rotolo’s father died when she was 14.
In a 2008 interview with NPR, Rotolo said that she kept her parents’ political affiliations a secret until 1989 — which helped her understand Dylan’s desire to keep his real name, Robert Zimmerman, private. Rotolo discovered Dylan’s birth name when he accidentally dropped his wallet, and his draft card fell out.
“I saw his name and I was really – that’s when I was hurt,” she said. “I said you never told me that this was your real name. I understand you didn’t tell anybody else, but you could have at least told me.”
She was an artist and activist
Like Dylan, Rotolo was involved in N.Y.C.’s folk revival scene. She made jewelry, illustrated and painted before finding her niche in book art, creating booklike pieces from found objects. She also taught at the Parsons School of Design, per NPR.
Rotolo was also an activist for the civil rights movement. While dating Dylan, she worked for the Congress for Racial Equality and participated in demonstrations against American nuclear policy. The artist remained politically active throughout her life.
In 2004, she joined a theater troupe called Billionaires for Bush and protested at the Manhattan Republican convention under the pseudonym Alla DaPie.
She met Dylan at a folk concert
In July 1961, Rotolo attended a folk concert at the Riverside Church in Manhattan, where Dylan was performing. In his 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume 1, the singer said that “right from the start” he couldn’t take his eyes off Rotolo.
“She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen,” Dylan wrote. “She was fair skinned and golden haired, full-blood Italian. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves. We started talking and my head started to spin. Cupid’s arrow had whistled past my ears before, but this time it hit me in the heart and the weight of it dragged me overboard.”
When asked what she thought of that excerpt, Rotolo told NPR that it was a “wonderful and generous and a lovely thing.” In her 2008 memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties, she described Dylan as “oddly old-time looking, charming in a scraggly way.”
The pair started dating almost immediately and moved into a walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village.
She was on the cover of one of his albums
Rotolo was famously photographed with Dylan for the cover of his 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. She described the reasoning behind her outfit choice to The New York Times in 2008.
“It was freezing out,” the artist said. “He wore a very thin jacket, because image was all. Our apartment was always cold, so I had a sweater on, plus I borrowed one of his big, bulky sweaters. On top of that I put on a coat. So I felt like an Italian sausage.”
In her NPR interview, Rotolo said when she did the photo shoot, she had no idea how much of an impact it would have on her life. Even though it was her “identifier” for years, she said the iconic image was far from her identity.
“I thought it was a great cover, very unusual cover for the time,” she said. “And the first time I saw it was … in black and white and blown up very big and that really made an impression. It was almost embarrassing.”
Dylan wrote songs about their relationship — and breakup
In 1962, Rotolo went to study art in Italy for eight months. She told NPR that she was supposed to go after high school, but a car accident had derailed her plans. When Rotolo was offered the opportunity again, she took it but Dylan didn’t want her to go.
“He did say don’t go, but he didn’t want to restrict me from considering going at the same time,” she said. “And it was a difficult decision for me.”
The musician wrote multiple songs about Rotolo’s leaving, including “Boots of Spanish Leather.” When she returned home, Rotolo learned that people who heard the tracks blamed her for making him “suffer.”
“I’ve always been a shy person, so to have this relationship kind of thrown right out there in public was very horrible,” she said. “I was very private. I didn’t go broadcasting things around, and yet people seemed to know how I had made him suffer. Publicly, he was letting that out. But I see that that was just his way of working through it, making it part of his art. But at the time, I just felt so exposed.”
Sometime after her return, Dylan had a public affair with fellow folk singer Joan Baez, who he had started performing with. Rotolo moved out of their apartment in August 1963 and, after discovering she was pregnant, had an abortion. The couple called it quits in 1964.
“The alliance between Suze and me didn’t turn out exactly to be a holiday in the woods,” Dylan wrote in his memoir. “Eventually fate flagged it down and it came to a full stop. It had to end. She took one turn in the road and I took another.”
Dylan famously penned “Ballad in Plain D” about an argument he got into with Rotolo and her sister, per the American Songwriter. He later told author Bill Flanagan in 1985 that he regretted the song, saying, “I must have been a real schmuck to write that. I look back at that particular one and say, of all the songs I’ve written, maybe I could have left that alone.”
Dylan said Rotolo strongly influenced his music
The years Dylan spent with Rotolo were impactful on his songwriting because of both her artistic interests and her activism. In Robert Shelton’s 1986 book No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, the singer said that he ran a lot of his songs by her.
“She’ll tell you how many nights I stayed up and wrote songs and showed them to her and asked her: ‘Is this right?’ ” Dylan said. “Because her father and her mother were associated with unions and she was into this equality-freedom thing long before I was.”
She later married an Italian film editor
In 1967, Rotolo married an Italian film editor named Enzo Bartoccioli. Though she initially met him during her earlier trip to Italy, she told NPR that they didn’t meet up again until many years later.
After living in Italy, the couple moved to the United States in the 1970s. They shared one son together, Luca Bartoccioli.
She died in 2011
Rotolo died at her Manhattan home on Feb. 25, 2011, after a long journey with lung cancer. She was 67.
Dylan and Rotolo stayed in touch over the years. After their relationship was over, he helped her when an apartment fire destroyed most of her things — including the famous green coat she wore on his album cover, per The Guardian.
Dylan asked to change Rotolo’s name for A Complete Unknown
Though Fanning’s character was inspired by Suze, Dylan requested that her name be changed in A Complete Unknown. Fanning said she wanted to honor Dylan and Rotolo’s history with how she played the role.
“Suze, in real life, was the one who pushed him to sing his own songs and not just the same folk songs,” The Great actress told Gold Derby. “She was very politically active in the civil rights movement, and Bob wasn’t actually so up on the politics of the time until he met Suze. So she was a guiding light for him in that time.”
She continued, “It was a very special relationship for him, so I felt a real responsibility to kind of capture that essence of their young adulthood and time together and essence of her as best as I could.”
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